Some sharp people in Houston already think so. In fact, they're betting $2.1 million that Aussie Daniel Timms is the bloke for the job.

Among the believers are Dr. Denton Cooley, who founded the Texas Heart Institute 50 years ago, and Dr. Bud Frazier, a surgeon there who has transplanted more hearts than anyone in the world, and a principal in the development of multiple heart pumps and artificial hearts.

"I think we're beyond the Kitty Hawk stage with this," Frazier said.

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There is, of course, no way to know whether Timms' tiny, revolutionary artificial heart will ever save a life. The field of artificial hearts is seeded with failure.

Perhaps the most spectacular of these is the AbioCor heart. Over three decades investors spent nearly $200 million to develop the world's first fully implantable total artificial heart. For all that it was too impractical, too large and didn't work long enough. It's been implanted into just 14 people.

Magnetic levitation

Timms' device, named the BiVACOR, is smaller, and uses magnetic levitation technology to pump blood around the body.

It's unnatural, too. Hearts pump - Timms' device delivers a continuous flow of blood. Yet when Billy Cohn first laid eyes on the instrument a year ago he knew it was special.

"People bring in suitcases all the time with these devices, and by and large it's a lot of crap," said Cohn, a surgeon at the Texas Heart Institute. "When Daniel came in I realized almost immediately this was the mostly highly evolved and brilliant device I've ever seen. I immediately told him he should move to Houston."

But there was a snag.

The institute did not have millions of dollars to move Timms and several research associates from around the world to Houston, nor pay the continued costs to refine the device for use in humans.

Cohn desperately wanted what he believed could be the world's first successful artificial heart to be developed in his hometown of Houston. Bad enough that it might not be developed here. Worse yet, without adequate funding or facilities, the BiVACOR might never become a reality.

So Cohn called on Mattress Mack.

McIngvale delivers

The two men had met improbably in 1990, when Cohn was chief emergency medicine resident at Ben Taub General Hospital and Jim McIngvale was building an empire with Gallery Furniture.

The new Ben Taub hospital had just opened, and was nicer and more spacious than the original hospital, recalled Dr. Kenneth Mattox, now chief of surgery at Ben Taub.

As part of the transfer, the Harris County Hospital District had discarded older, worn-out gurneys. But not all the replacements had been delivered.

There were patients, Mattox said, who weren't sick enough to be admitted, but not quite well enough to be sent home. They needed to be monitored, and there were only hard chairs for them to sit in. It was uncomfortable for patients, and difficult for doctors to keep track of them.

It was, in fact, chaos.

After serving his first 24-hour shift in the new emergency department, Cohn had had enough. In his scrubs, bleary, weary, blood and all, he burned up Interstate 45.

Cohn says he walked into the store, asked for Mack, and explained the situation. Simple as that. The next day a truck delivered two dozen recliners and some mattresses. They fit the bill.

The two would not meet again until about five years ago, when Mack's older brother, George, was suffering from an increasingly severe heart disease. George came to the Texas Heart Institute.

"I remember visiting up there and in walks Bud (Frazier) and Billy Cohn," Mack said. "I hadn't seen him in 20 years, and now he's there fighting for my brother's life."

George McIngvale received a heart pump, but he eventually died in December 2008. Nonetheless, Mack deeply appreciated the care his brother received.

So touched was he that before leaving the hospital after George's death, Mack told Billy Cohn that if he ever needed anything, he should call.

From heartbeat to hum

Houston made its bones as a worldwide center of medical excellence with heart surgery, but has had something of a tortured history with the artificial heart.

In 1963, during the anything-is-possible age of spaceflight, Dr. Michael DeBakey led a contingent of scientists to Capitol Hill, saying the artificial heart could be brought to "full fruition if we had more funds."

The researchers were rewarded with $10 million. After a decade that included a tempestuous split with Cooley, his former protégé, DeBakey gave up. Too complex, he decided.

Work on developing artificial hearts continued at the Texas Heart Institute and elsewhere. In addition to the AbioCor, there were the Jarvik-7 and others. But few patients receiving one of these artificial hearts ever leave the hospital.

There has been more success with heart pumps, which mimic the action of the left or right ventricle of the heart, and over the last decade these pumps have evolved from being pulsatile, or heartbeat-like, to continuous flow.

In 2011 Cohn and Frazier made history by combining two of these pumps to implant the world's first continuous-flow total artificial heart.

When a Texas Heart Institute colleague, Steve Parnis, spoke shortly after the surgery about those results at a medical conference in Singapore, Timms was in the audience. After discussing the Australian's research, Parnis invited Timms to Houston.

Different activities, such as standing or running, place various pumping demands on the heart's left and right ventricles. Timms achieved a key breakthrough when he figured out how to make his device responsive to those demands.

He devised a fist-sized instrument with an electronic system that adjusts 10,000 times a second to incoming blood flow. The titanium device, thus, mimics the natural heart's ability to change its rate of pumping on its left and right side in response to the bodily actions.

Decade of struggle

Like Cohn and Frazier, Timms believes artificial hearts must use continuous blood flow, and his BiVACOR device does so with only a single moving part, a central impeller completely suspended inside by magnetic levitation. Thus, there is no wearing out of the components.

Timms initially worked with John Fraser, a device expert at Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane, Australia, and eventually formed a team including scientists in Japan, Germany and Taiwan who donated their time and expertise to the cause.

He has struggled for 10 years. He went a year without a salary, and he's slept on many couches, but he's kept going.

Fraser said a device prolonged the life of Timms' father, and that may, in part, explain the son's passion.

"I think there is a strong personal reason with his dad," Fraser said. "I've seen him work continuously for three days without sleep. He smelled bad, sure, but got the job done."

Timms said he became convinced that if he ever quit, his dream would die.

"Fortunately, I've been either stubborn or stupid enough to keep it going," he said. "I got a lot of encouragement. Every cardiac surgeon I would talk to would say to keep going, that it's a worthy cause. But I knew if I dropped the ball, the thing would stop."

A few years ago surgeons implanted the prototype heart into two sheep in Australia. The animals immediately died. Likewise two cows in Taiwan.

Then Timms visited Houston in September. He brought an unfinished device, so rough that some key components had been machined by a 3-D printer rather than built from titanium. But after Frazier and Cohn implanted the device in a cow, it stood up, ate hay and survived half a day before the device broke down.

That's all it took. After 10 years of inadequate funding and facilities, Timms made the painful decision to leave his home Down Under. He wanted Houston. And Houston wanted Timms.

Mattress Mack was always going to be an easy mark.

He loves Houston. Loves that it's a place where hard work breeds success. The idea of developing an artificial heart that could save hundreds of thousands of lives, that could have saved George's life, and that could be realized in Houston with the help of his money - all of it was irresistible to Mack.

"It's my wife that is the hard one to impress," he said.

Selling the salesman

At the invitation of Cohn and Frazier, on Dec. 13, Mack, his wife, Linda, and their two children visited the Texas Heart Institute to learn. Also in the room were Cooley and Dr. James Willerson, president of the institute.

"When I was in that room there wasn't no doubt about who was the dumbest person in the room," he said. "Hands down."

But they were sold. Shortly after the meeting he and Linda decided to underwrite the entire $2.1 million Timms needs to relocate his team to Houston this spring and conduct research for two years. In that time Timms, Cohn and others should gather enough data in animals to prove the device's worth, and obtain federal funding to allow human tests.